Everyday Ethics

Everyday Ethics

For the first time in several years, I am not teaching ethics this semester. In fact, I’m not teaching at all and may have hung up my teaching spurs for life at this point. What I remind myself is that teaching ethics was much harder than I ever thought it would be. That is much like the degree of difficulty we all face each and every day with ethical dilemmas that present themselves to us in our everyday lives. I believe that it is hard to go through a normal day without encountering some sort of ethical question, but sometimes the dilemmas rise to the level of conundrum and stop us in our tracks. I used to say to my students that the basis for all ethical dilemmas were based on several key elements, the greatest of which has to do with money. It is true that control, emotion and fear are also sometimes involved, but chances are that money is still in there somewhere. I suppose that has to do with the basic and somewhat primordial issue of survival, given that the most important aspect of survival in the modern world is the sufficiency of money. But the truth is that while some people encounter dilemmas where true sufficiency of money is a life or death situation, most of the monetary issues we face are at the margin and impact our cushion of comfort rather than our basic survival. I tend to think that it still all happens in the brain stem where we react rather than consider our actions at great length. If a predator makes a kill and is challenged over that kill, it may affect his reaction if he has recently eaten or if he is hungry, but most often his instinct tells him to fight for his kill, even under threat of real danger or injury, because he is never certain where his next kill will come from and nature tells him to take what he can get when he can get it. We as thinking beings are supposed to be able to think through that primordial knee-jerk and consider other elements as trivial as reputation and as elemental as punishment through litigation, but also as to the right or wrong of our actions. That thinking process may or may not prevail over the brain stem based on circumstances and probably based on one person’s conscience versus another’s.

I recently bought a large 85” Samsung Neo-QLED TV because I wanted a crisper picture than offered by my ten year old 83” Samsung. I bought it at Best Buy rather than CostCo. because I have a full Geek Squad membership that covers such things as installation and repair. I paid $2,400 for it, which while hardly life-changing among expenses, is not an insignificant amount of money. During installation there was a problem getting the full home theater speaker system working right and I agreed to just go with the TV speaker since I thought it would suffice. Over the holiday weekend, with the ambient noise from our visiting horde of children, I discovered that the audio was not as sufficient as I had hoped. I decided that I needed to add a soundbar to the TV, so I went to Best Buy on Black Friday (bright and early in the morning) and found the “just right” Samsung soundbar for about $700. That means that my TV upgrade now had me for $3,100. I decided to self-install the soundbar since it seemed easy enough. It allowed for the choice of hardwiring or wireless Bluetooth connection. I opted for Bluetooth on the theory that the streaming was already via WiFi to the TV (I have the fastest internet WiFi that Cox provides…up to 900 MPS). It all worked fine.

But then, I started to find that I was having connectivity issues. This seemed to only happen on Hulu, but that is my primary streaming provider, the one where I watch multiple hours of MSNBC every day. I noted that we did not have the problem on either our bedroom or kitchen TVs, so it didn’t seem to be the service, but rather something in the TV. This was not an unheard of issue with my old TV, but it used to happen much less frequently and had to do with WiFi connectivity itself, not so much a temporary interruption in connectivity like I was now experiencing. I called Geek Squad and made an appointment for them to come out and fix the issue this week, thinking that it was a most likely a latent installation problem perhaps made worse by my installation of the soundbar, but maybe not. That all seemed like a legitimate use of my Geek Squad membership benefits on multiple levels. I could have had them come out to install the soundbar in the first place, but I was also genuinely not satisfied with the connectivity and the prior technician did seem to have problems with the hook-up to the audio system, so maybe it had been improperly installed. It might also be a problem with the TV, which was certainly covered by the Geek Squad membership plan since I bought all the equipment from Best Buy and was not using any bootlegged components. No ethical dilemmas there.

Then, when Kim was decorating for the holidays, she placed two large metal stars that we have in the nooks above the TV. She uses this stuff called Museum Wax that is designed to keep things on shelves in place and prevent things from falling off. She has used this stuff for years and has placed those same stars above the TV for several years, never with any issue. This year, both stars proceeded to fall off their perches, clanging to the floor. It seems the Museum Wax has lost its mojo somewhere along the way. The noise the falls made was jarring, but I told Kim that at least they didn’t damage the TV. And then I saw it. On the left side of the TV, especially when the screen was black, I could see a small half-inch scratch on the flat screen surface. Upon examination, I could see a longer, less severe scratch for another few inches attached to the bad half-inch scratch. And then, while inspecting the TV, I also found an almost identical scratch on the right side of the TV, only a little less severe and less noticeable. There is no doubt in my mind that those scratches were caused by the falling stars. Damn! I followed my natural instinct and looked up repair solutions for such scratches and ordered some specialized scratch-removal cream from Amazon.

That’s when the ethical dilemma kicked in. It occurred to me that these matching scratches looked like they could have occurred in the transport or installation. In fact, in abstraction and in the absence of knowing otherwise, that was the most likely reason for these identical scratches. Perhaps when the Geek Squad people came I could use that old “What’d you do!!!” approach, feigning ignorance and demanding a replacement TV. My guess is that it would have worked, but therein lay the ethical problem. It would require me to lie about it for the benefit of $2,400 (assuming the soundbar is just fine). It also struck me that the connectivity issues might be cause enough to demand another TV.

When our friend Melisa was over for a Garden Club meeting with Kim, another decoration put up with Museum Wax fell and its caused us to tell Melisa about the TV damage. As I fully expected, this product damage got back to Mike when Melisa got home and Mike called me to empathize. When I started to discuss the ethical issue, Mike cut me short and reminded me that as a member of the Geek Squad, one of the added benefits is a product protection plan. To Mike, that was an open and shut case for getting a new TV. It caused me to look up the terms and conditions of that plan and it is worded such that “Coverage only applies to a failure caused by an accident from handling that is the result from unexpected and unintentional event that arises from your normal daily usage…” While that language clearly has some outs for Best Buy and Geek Squad, the scratches are certainly failures caused by an accident. There was “handling” involved. It was unexpected and unintentional. And it was also arising from normal daily usage, unless you want to consider the holidays abnormal (which I don’t). What I have decided to do is to come clean with Best Buy and try to get them to replace the TV on these grounds. Let’s see how this case of everyday ethics turns out so we can watch our heartfelt Christmas movies with an unburdened heart.